When I was writing the last words of the preceding chapter of this book, and was about to
"Heed my tired pen's entreaty,
And say, oh, friends, valete,"
I seemed to be trying to awake from a trance in which I had been the unwilling instrument, compelled by an intelligence extraneous to myself to expose to an incredulous public the most sacred scenes and thoughts of a lifetime.
I had decided to relieve the patience of my readers with the thirty-first chapter; but when the retrospective kaleidoscope closed, a vision rose before me so vivid, so real, that I am constrained to describe it in the hope that the warning may prevent the tragic part of the dream from becoming a reality.
It is Christmas day in the year of our Lord, 1910; the thunder-cloud, which for many years had been increasing in blackness, now surcharged with pent-up lightnings, and overspreading our entire national horizon, bursts with the fury of a cyclone.
The great masses of the people had for a long time watched with ever-increasing rage the seeming conspiracy of the employing and professional classes to bind to their chariot-wheels those who labored with their hands. Gigantic trusts had "cornered" all the necessaries of life, and a few lily-fingered plutocrats in their marble palaces dictated to the horny-handed sons of toil the amount of their beggarly wages, and the prices they must pay for every needed article, until every job of work and every bone of charity was fought for by multitudes who mercilessly stabbed each other in their mad fury to assuage the pangs of hunger.
When the people rallied at the polls, and elected to the high offices members of their own unions, the millionaires bribed these officials to obey their every command, and these mercenary law-makers, as often as chosen, joined the ever-growing ranks of the oppressors.
Even the almost innumerable colleges throughout the Republic, whose treasuries had absorbed countless millions of dollars, had proved a measureless curse, as they had become mere cramming machines and nurseries of lawlessness and brutality. The great universities had long idolized plug-ugly football kickers and baseball sluggers to the utter ignoring of scholarship, until the hordes of eleemosinary prize-fighters among the so-called students created a reign of terror where they were located, and far surpassed in ferocity even the gladiators of ancient Rome. The annual "athletic contest" between the two greatest universities was fought out with almost inconceivable fury on "Soldiers' Field."
Irresistible bodies met the immovable, cheered on by yelling legions, each phalanx would conquer or die, and die they did by scores; they kicked and slugged like maniacs until separated by the combined police-forces of the surrounding cities, and more were killed and wounded than in the entire Spanish War. When night fell, thousands of collegians invaded the capitol of the State, and with savage yells and wedge-rushes drove all citizens from the streets; they closed every theatre, pelting the actors with whiskey bottles stolen from the saloons in which they had smashed thousands of dollars' worth of costly furniture; they stole every sign from stores, which caught their fancy; no woman was respected, until their orgies were stopped by the bayonets of the national guard.
Such "scholars" as these had for many years been ground through these educational mills by thousands, crowding the ranks of the professional classes to suffocation. Legions of unscrupulous lawyers, more heartless than pirates or brigands in Bulgaria, infested every city and town, busy as demons stirring up strife, drilling witnesses to perjury, bull-dozing the innocent even unto death with the full connivance of the plunder-sharing judges, until the jails were crowded with victims who could not pay their outrageous fees.